While content creators are the face of the creator economy, behind the curtain is a whole industry of jobs.
From advertising to tech jobs, the creator economy — which Goldman Sachs estimated will be worth $480 billion by 2027 — has been bolstered by startups building tools to help creators and brands alike monetize the growing space.
The space hasn’t been immune to the rough waters of the economy at large, however. Like the broader tech and media landscape, creator-economy startups have faced mass layoffs for nearly two years, and some are seeing big valuation cuts.
But Creator Economy Jobs, a startup that tracks and posts job openings in the creator economy, still sees opportunity in the space.
“We had a funding boom end of 2020 [into] 2021 coming out of COVID —[the] creator-economy space was very hot,” Creator Economy Jobs founder James Creech said. “That was great, but it also attracted a lot of tourists to the space rather than the passionate long-term builders.”
As a result of that cycle, there was a weeding out and “natural consolidation” of creator-economy startups, Creech added.
Many creator economy startups are still hiring, however.
According to a recent report by Creator Economy Jobs, companies like Coda Payments (a monetization startup that lets users make money from games or other digital content), Pinterest, and Figma “have the most open roles” as of March.
The report analyzed over 1,500 job posts from about 600 companies on the platform. Creech said the companies posting on the platform are primarily looking to fill roles with staffers who have creator-economy expertise.
Here are 5 takeaways from the report:
Engineering roles are in high demand for 2024
According to Creator Economy Jobs’ data, 30.3% of the jobs posted in the first quarter of 2024 were engineering roles.
“I think the explosion of AI and AI applications for creator-economy startups is driving a lot of that hiring activity right now,” Creech said.
The engineering roles across the board include front-end developers, full-stack managers, and data scientists, he added.
Sales and marketing roles are the second largest categories, making up 16.1% and 12.7% of job postings, respectively.
Creator-economy companies are mostly hiring for midlevel roles
The platform describes midlevel jobs as requiring two to five years of experience — making up 43.8% of positions listed in Q1 2024.
The US is the global hot spot for the creator economy
Nearly 40% of the companies hiring are based in the US, according to the data. Companies that consider themselves remote made up 11.5%. Companies based in the UK and Germany both made about 5% each.
San Francisco leads Los Angeles and New York City in top US cities for creator-economy jobs
While Los Angeles usually comes to mind when thinking about content creators and entertainment, San Francisco-based jobs made up 7.6% of listings.
“There’s so much funding and activity in the Bay Area,” Creech said, even though he’s based in LA himself. “I think increasingly more startups are recognizing the opportunity in the creator economy being built there.”
The creator-economy companies hiring the most in Q1 range from social-media platforms to e-commerce startups
“Despite all of the doom and gloom sometimes around layoffs, the energy around the people I talk to, talking to founders or hiring teams every week, it feels like, okay, things are going again, we’re open for business,” Creech said.
Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 companies that had the most open roles listed on Creator Economy Jobs for Q1 of 2024.
